Things Invisible to See (4 page)

Under the junior class picture for ’41, her name was listed among the missing.

She was also missing from the sophomore class picture in ’40. But he found Marsha, smiling broadly, three months before her mother remarried and Marsha Kerlikoski transferred to Country Day and became Marsha Deller.

In the yearbook for ’39, Clare’s name appeared under the freshman class picture, and Ben searched row after row until he found her: a child with long straight hair who had closed her eyes at the wrong moment. What did she look like now, this sleeper in the middle row of two hundred ninth graders?

O
VER THE URGENT STACCATO
of Lowell Thomas spitting out Monday’s six o’clock news, the telephone rang, and Helen Bishop, who was guiding a pillowslip through the mangle, called from the cellar, “Don’t answer it, Hal. It’s bad news.”

“No news could be worse than what I’m hearing,” said Hal. “We’re practically at war.”

He picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Hal?” crackled a faint voice at the other end. “Hal? I can hardly hear you.”

Helen’s sisters sounded so exactly alike on the phone that Hal could never be sure whether he was talking to Vicky or Nell. But it sounded like long distance. It would be Vicky, calling from Grosse Pointe.

“Vicky?” he guessed.

“I hope I didn’t wake anybody,” said Vicky. The line snapped and roared, as if she were chewing on it.

“We’re all up,” said Hal.

“How’s Clare?”

“Not too good,” he said and felt his voice choking up.

“Call Helen to the phone. And tell her to turn off the iron. She’s burning the sheets.”

“What makes you think—?”

“I can smell it,” said Vicky. Of her acute sense of smell Vicky would only say, “It’s the aftereffects of scarlet fever” and “It runs in the family.”

Almost immediately there was a distinct smell of scorched linen, and the connection opened up loud and clear, as if they’d both dropped into a lower altitude.

“Hold on,” said Hal. “I’ll call Helen.”

He opened the door to the cellar and shouted, “Vicky’s calling you from Grosse Pointe!”

Then he headed upstairs to listen on the bedroom extension. Helen clumped breathlessly into the hall and collapsed on the love seat and put the receiver to her ear.

“Here I am.”

“How’s Clare?” asked Vicky.

“I was with her again last night. She’s having some trouble moving her legs.”

“She can’t walk,” said Hal on the extension.

“You mean she’s paralyzed?” asked Vicky.

“So far the tests don’t show any nerve or muscle damage,” Helen went on.

“Isn’t it nice you’ve got Nell to help you,” said Vicky.

Helen and Vicky both knew their youngest sister had never done a lick of housework all the years they were growing up together. As the oldest, Helen had done it all. The ironing: her father’s shirts with the little tucks in them. The dishes: her mother saved them for her, both lunch and breakfast, to do when she came home from school.

“Nell never turns her hand,” said Helen. “She teaches till four, and I’ve got Davy to look after. He’s only in first grade a half-day.”

“Fred and I are bringing Grandma to your house next Wednesday,” said Vicky. After Davy was born, first Nell and then Helen and Vicky had started calling their own mother and father Grandma and Grandpa. Sometimes Helen wondered if their new names had helped to hasten her parents into old age.

“We’re not staying for supper,” added Vicky.

“Couldn’t you wait till Clare is better?” pleaded Helen.

“You owe me six months already,” replied Vicky. “From the time you had the flu. I can’t stand it anymore. Grandma’s getting worse.”

“How worse?” inquired Hal.

“This morning she tried to pay for her breakfast. She thought I was the hostess at Christianson’s.”

“What about that woman you found to watch her?” asked Helen.

“She quit. Grandma hit her.”

“She did?” exclaimed Hal. “She really hit her?”

“Right in the face. You can’t find anybody in Grosse Pointe who wants to take care of old people. I see these ads for wonderful nursing homes in the paper—”

“No nursing home,” said Helen firmly. “I won’t put my mother in a nursing home. Vicky, I’ve got to run. The doorbell’s going to ring, and I’m in my old housedress.”

“Who’s coming by at this hour?” asked Vicky.

“I can’t tell yet. Good-bye.”

The front door chimed its two tones. Before Helen could unlock the door, it opened of itself. Her youngest sister, framed in the doorway, glanced up from the depths of her purse.

“Found my key,” said Nell.

Her voice triggered footsteps on the stairs. Davy, in blue sleepers, hugged his mother’s legs and rubbed his cheek against her Persian lamb coat.

“Tell me ’bout the movie! Tell me ’bout the movie!” he begged.

“Vicky called,” said Helen. “She’s bringing Grandma here next week.”

“Isn’t that awful,” said Nell. “Isn’t that the worst you ever heard.”

“We’ll all have to pitch in and help,” said Hal.

Nell looked hurt. “Why, of course.”

“Tell me ’bout the movie!” screamed Davy.

“It starred Veronica Lake,” said Nell, prying his fingers from her knees. “What I wouldn’t give to have hair like hers.”

She ran a grieving hand through light brown hair that curled in thin ringlets to her shoulders.

“How was your date with the piano tuner?” asked Hal. “What’s his name—?”

“William Patrick Simpson,” said Nell. “I found out something awful about him.”

“He’s married?” asked Helen.

“He’s Catholic,” said Nell.

“Patrick,” said Helen. “Of course, with a name like that. Wouldn’t you know.”

She prided herself on her freedom from prejudice. Everyone in the Bishop family followed a different faith. She was Congregational, Nell was Grace Bible, and Clare was a Quaker. Nobody knew for certain what Hal believed except Hal, but Helen feared it involved reincarnation. He went to church with her only on Christmas and Easter.

“He’s also married,” said Nell. “His wife went to the movies with us.”

“You all three went to the movies?” exclaimed Hal.

Nell nodded. “She said I’m the nicest girl Bill—she calls him Bill—has taken out since they got their separation.”

“Can I have the kitty in my bed tonight?” begged Davy.

“Sweetheart, I’ve told you a million times,” said Nell. “The kitty gives you asthma.”

She hung her coat on the rack by the front door and hoisted the child to her hip, though he was getting too heavy for her to carry. At the first landing she paused for breath and groped for the switch that lit the corridor and stairs to the second landing.

Under the molding, a row of lights flashed on. Dozens of photographs of Ericsons and Bishops, frame nudging frame, seemed to open their eyes. Her parents, in their wedding picture, smiled out at her, the way they had looked before she started calling them Grandma and Grandpa. And here was Hal in his laboratory ten years ago, holding on his bare wrist the great horned owl he had tamed to sit on his desk during lectures. Time had taken the owl but hardly touched Hal. His hair was still black and wavy, parted at the side, his features still fine, though he had put on a little weight.

And there in soft focus and ivory satin, straight and simple as a Doric column, stood Nell the bride, between her sisters in their taffeta bridesmaid’s dresses. Vicky and Helen might have been twins in this picture: both tall and slender—none of them had changed very much—with those green eyes that Grandpa called “the Ericson eyes,” as one calls a disease or a star after the person who discovered it. Nell’s eyes were brown, like the eyes of some sad, clever animal, the last of its kind on the planet.

The bridegroom was not present. The marriage had lasted six months, during which he managed not to appear in so much as a snapshot.

Nell turned off the light and the photographs fell asleep, and the light over the second landing came on.

“It’s me, Grandpa,” called Nell.

“I knew it was you,” he called back. Grandpa Ericson was a small, pale man, nearly bald. In his white long johns, he looked like a friendly gnome. “I just wanted to light your way.”

“Somebody’s following us,” whispered Davy.

“Those pictures can’t see you,” said Nell. “I’ve told you a hundred times they’re not alive.”

He’s looking right at me,
whispered Clare to the Ancestress.
Can he see us?

He sees us, but he forgets what he has seen. We pass through his thoughts like water.

The two spirits floated after Nell and Davy, arrived at the rooms on the third floor, took a turn to the left, and entered the attic. It was filled with suitcases, linens, outgrown clothes, broken toys, books, framed Sunday school certificates, and half a dozen electric fans. In an overstuffed chair in the middle of the room, Grandpa was reading the Bible by the light of a floor lamp with a purple silk shade. His bed, his bookshelf, on which stood his bust of Andrew Still, founder of osteopathy, and his little bureau made a room within the larger room. Helen had installed his beehive in the window (he’d brought it all the way from Corunna) with the hope of attracting bees, though this arrangement cut off most of the natural light.

Grandpa?
whispered Clare.

He did not stir, though he had good hearing for a man of his age. She followed the Ancestress out of the attic. They passed the bathroom, where the tub squatted on cracked legs over Helen’s twelve sterling place settings, as if hatching them.

They passed through the closed door ahead of them into the room that Nell and Davy had shared since the divorce. “The maid’s room,” Helen called it, from the days when you could get a maid for nothing but her room and board. Davy was curled up in one bed, sucking his thumb hard, clutching the knotted bath towel he took with him into the uncharted waters of sleep.

On the opposite bed lay the clutter of Nell’s lesson plans. Nell sat hunched over her desk, her tweed jacket thrown over her shoulders. On the lapel gleamed a golden eagle, from whose mouth dangled a heart. The heart was inscribed, in a flourishing hand, “My Heart Is with the U.S.A.”

Her fourth graders liked to open the heart and say hello to Davy gazing out at them from the left side. She’d replaced Davy’s father with a picture of Clark Gable till something better came along.

From where Clare hovered over the dressing table, she could look down on Nell’s Madame Du Barry Beauty Box. The wooden carrying case lay open, and Madame Du Barry, silhouetted on the pale blue lid, was showing Clare her best side. Tins of rouge, eye shadow, bottles of perfume and lotion—all rose like the landscape of a toy city.

Downstairs, Helen turned off the lights.

Come
, said the Ancestress.
When the human lights go out, you can see your way by the light from the stars.

Seeing that Hal was asleep, Helen reached across him and snapped off his radio, then crawled into her own bed. His shoes, huddled together at his bedside, brought tears to her eyes. Like all his clothes, they were made to his measure and sent from England.

He’ll have to buy his clothes in stores for the duration, thought Helen.

It was her last thought before she fell asleep.

The living room was dark, yet everything Clare saw wore a skin of light. The grand piano. The sofa, on which Cinnamon Monkeyshines was stretched at full length, purring, dreaming that the fire was awake in the fireplace.

In the dining room, behind the glass doors of the three china cabinets, the rims of plates and cups and saucers shone like planets.

Everything was shining in its own radiance, humming in its own dance.

You might want to try the piano
, said the Ancestress.

I beg your pardon?
said Clare.

Or the cat. The cat would be easy for your first time.

My first time for what?
asked Clare.

On the other hand, if you try the piano, you’ll know for certain. Either it plays or it does not play.

First time for what?
asked Clare again.

For finding new rooms
, said the Ancestress.
New houses. Watch.

And she brushed up against the piano and disappeared, leaving a deep silence in her wake. To Clare’s astonishment, the keys depressed themselves and the piano began to play.

Do you know this one?
asked the piano. It spoke in the voice of the Ancestress.

Clare was silent.

The piano played a few more bars.

Now I recognize it,
said Clare.
It’s “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”

Suddenly the Ancestress passed through the wood, as if the piano were no more than a shadow of itself.

Try the cat,
urged the Ancestress.
Nudge right up to him, as if he were your own body.

Clare drew close to Cinnamon Monkeyshines. Nothing happened.

It’s as easy as walking on water
, said the Ancestress.
Don’t think about how you do it. Just do it.

The exact moment when she entered the cat Clare did not know; it was as if a strong wind filled her and blew all her senses clean. Her ears gathered the sigh of a moth’s wing outside the window and the breath of a mouse behind the wainscot, and she knew these sounds as if she’d known them always. She smelled the flesh under the mouse’s fur and the sour smell of its fear. A dust ball under the radiator shifted and she spied it. An ember broke into ashes in the fireplace and she heard it. A squirrel muttered in its sleep, huddled in the eaves outside, and she was overcome with a desire to set the universe right, to sweep it clean and quiet as a bone, to rid it of all small quick moving things except herself.

Who are you?
asked the Ancestress.

I am Clare
, answered the cat.

Can you move the body you have entered, as I moved the keys on the piano?

Clare sent herself into every muscle and nerve. Cinnamon Monkeyshines stood up.

Not paralyzed, I see,
observed the Ancestress.

The cat scampered across the room and exclaimed,
It feels wonderful!